“...so your mama was in the middle of the river in a shopping cart, and neither your Uncle Dev or I could swim—that’s one of the first things I’ll teach you, especially since we have a pool—so we ended up buying three gallon bottles of milk and chugging as much as we could, because we didn’t want to waste it. By the time we finished drinking what we could and pouring out the rest, I had this huge pain in my stomach, but we still had to rescue your mama. We tied those bottles together with rope and threw them out on the water, and your mama had to leap from the shopping cart and do this weird dog paddle back to shore while we pulled her in. As soon as she reached the bank, your Uncle Dev turned into the bushes and must have puked up half a gallon of milk.” He chuckled, and I continued to stand outside the door, holding my breath and not making a noise. “I promise I won’t let you forget your mom, but Nova seems like a pretty good stand-in. You’re gonna be a lucky boy to have two mamas who love you so much. Some of us didn’t even get one.”

Argh. My heart.

I tiptoed back down the hall and opened the door to my bedroom a little louder than I normally would have. When I ducked around the corner into the nursery, River was holding Huey, all clean and zipped into his sleep sack thing. Huey was grumbly, and instead of taking him, I handed River the bottle and pointed to the rocking chair in the corner.

Bless Rigby. He’d thought of everything.

“Do you want to feed him and put him down? I can get started on putting our stuff away.”

His eyes darted between me and the grizzly baby. “I’d like that.”

He was almost too big for the chair, but somehow he managed to shift himself around until he was comfortable, tucking Huey in the crook of his ample arm. The baby took the bottle like a ravenous piranha.

“Just give me a shout if you need anything,” I told River softly, moving out of the room and back into the space that would be mine.

It was a beautiful room. You could sleep a family of nine in here, though; it was huge. Windows on two walls, a walk-in closet and an ensuite. The thread count on the sheets must have been a million because they felt like silk.